Jiaxie is not completely extinct, although today it's believed to be on the verge of disappearance. In the 1950s and 60s, jiaxie quilts, whose covers were decorated with clamp-resist dyed patterns, were still an essential part of nuptial celebrations in Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province . When a young local girl got engaged, her family would get busy preparing jiaxie quilts for her.
The patterns on the local traditional quilt covers in Wenzhou usually featured four horizontal and four vertical lines, making a grid pattern of 16 blocks. These blocks usually had designs depicting "100 sons," "double happiness" and "dragon and phoenix," with nuptial connotations.
Nowadays, however, few people carry on the traditional clamp-resist dyeing technique. Xue Xunlang, from Cangnan County of Wenzhou, almost accidentally revived clamp-resist dyeing and was the last person to run a workshop in the local area to produce jiaxie cloth.
In 1988, Xue got to know an elderly Japanese lady who ran the Lan Lan Chinese Flowery Cloth Store in Shanghai. At her request, Xue brought her some bolts of old cloth from the Chinese countryside including a piece of jiaxie cloth. When the Japanese woman told Xue that historians believed this handicraft technique had been lost in China Xue explained that such cloth was very common in Wenzhou. He said although it had not been manufactured for about 20 years, it wouldn't be difficult to resume production. In Cangnan, Xue went to meet with the Dai family, who used to own the most famous dyehouse in the area. The Dais recommended Chen Kangsuan, one of their ex-workers, to Xue. Chen was already 66 years old when he met Chen in 1989 and hadn't made any jiaxie cloth for over 30 years but he gladly agreed to try.
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